From this remarkable passage we can derive the idea of a necessary doubleness, and also the notion that the experience as remembered is not, affectively, of the same quality as the experience itself; or, as one almost needs to say, the experience as remembered is not the same as the experience remembered. Here is another aspect of difference in doubleness. A pain recalled is recognised as a pain, yet it may be recalled with pleasure; a past joy can be remembered with intense sadness (a point perhaps remembered by Dante, in a famous passage, as well as by Wordsworth). Augustine is sure, as many of his successors have been, that what memory celebrated is not, in tone or significance, identical with the actual moment remembered. For, as he remarks in Book XI. xviii, meditating on past and future: ‘the memory produces not the actual events which have passed away but words conceived from images of them, which they fixed in the mind like imprints as they passed through the senses … when I am recollecting and telling my story, I am looking on its image in present time …’ This image belongs to what he calls ‘the present of things past’. Other memories have worked on the image, and Augustine here anticipates the Freudian Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action (Freud spoke of ‘memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription’). Forgetfulness affects memories, of course, but memories can do the work of forgetfulness by modifying the original deposit, which is further changed when the product of time and much reworking must suffer a translation into language.

  For Augustine any such translation must be a fall. Language, in its nature successive, is part of the fallen world, the world of time. He sets the word against the Word; the Word belongs to the simultaneous present, the nunc stans, of eternity. In a famous passage (XI. xxviii) Augustine speaks of reciting a psalm. Before he begins to do so he has an expectation directed towards a whole. Verse by verse, as he recites, it passes into memory; so there is a blend of memory and expectation. But his attention is on the present, through which the future passes into the past. As he goes on, memory expands and expectation diminishes until the whole psalm has been said, and all is in the memory. The same action occurs in the life of the individual person, ‘where all actions are parts of a whole, and also of the total history of the “sons of men” (Ps. 30: 20) where all human lives are but parts’. So one’s life, in this respect like all other lives, passes into memory and has a typical near-completeness which, so long as we remain alive, we can seek in the memory; always remembering that when we report it in words we have in some measure to undo that completeness, both because we are using words, and because memory always entails forgetting.

  Although he stresses certain dualisms in the action of memory, Augustine does not doubt the continuous individuality of the ‘I’ which is doing the remembering and the forgetting. Nevertheless, he sees his life, and the life of all the fallen, as a collection of scattered fragments. But he is far from wanting to represent the memory-image and his own report of it as such; for in achieving closure, totality, it has taken on a kind of intemporality, it imitates the eternal Word. His story is in fact of the unification of those fragments by his conversion, the terminus of his narrative, the conquest of division. So in this matter of fragmentation and dispersal of the self you could say he is aware of the problems of memory and subjectivity, but not that he would have recognised his problem as expressed in the language of Nietzsche or that he could have accepted the rhetorical and formal solutions offered by Roland Barthes or Paul Valéry in the Cahiers. Augustine recognises fragmentation but his whole drift is to mend it. He is thus antithetical to these writers, and also to Henry Adams, who expressly wanted to deny the illusion of unity in his life, to bring it back ‘from unity to multiplicity’. This is the counter-Augustinian trend in modern autobiography. But the Augustinian strain remains strong.

  Our modern assumptions about memory are likely to refer more directly to the Freudian tradition. In a recent paper called ‘Freud and the Uses of Forgetting’ the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips begins by remarking that ‘People come for psychoanalytic treatment because they are remembering in a way that does not free them to forget.’ Symptoms are involuntary and disguised memories of desire, unsuccessful attempts at self-cure. Those memories need to be forgotten, but desire, for Freud, is unforgettable. Repression is simply a way of seeming to get rid of things by keeping them. There is no cure for memory, though we try to use it to forget with, as in screen memories, devices designed to enable us to forget memories of a forbidden desire. Psychoanalysis attempts a cure by inducing the kind of remembering that makes forgetting possible. The only certain cure is death.

  Here are paradoxes on remembering and forgetting that represent the two as a doublet and in that respect are faintly reminiscent of Augustine’s; but the differences are at least as marked. Phillips can think of the logic of Freud’s psychoanalytical process as being the reverse of what we take to be the autobiographer’s: ‘Either the most significant bits of one’s past are unconscious, and only available in the compromised form of symptoms and dreams; or the past is released through interpretation into oblivion.’ Forgetting is the only way to remember; remembering is the only way to achieve benign forgetting. The product of analysis is not autobiography but evacuation. And Phillips finds in the analyst’s ideal state of ‘free-floating’ or ‘evenly suspended attention’ a parallel use of forgetting; the analyst must learn not to mind not having things in mind, he works by not trying to remember. This is not, to most people’s way of thinking, at all like the practice of attentive reading (though it is sometimes held to be the correct practice, as in the writings of André Green and some others).

  So the concept of memory offered by psychoanalysis is at first sight hostile to the truth of autobiography. What we profess to remember is what we have devised to protect us from the truth; and this will be the case even when, or perhaps especially when, the attempt to hide nothing is exceptionally strenuous and well advertised, as with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The concept of Nachträglichkeit explains how a past is recovered in a distorted form; a childhood memory becomes a trauma, a trauma not directly associated with a ‘real’ childhood memory. Memory invents a past. Its reworkings defend us against the appalling timelessness of the unconscious. What we remember we may remember because we are forgetting in the wrong way; our remembering then takes the form of repetition, of acting out. If the analyst cures this repetition by fostering ‘the work of remembering’ he is not doing it because the memories thus elicited are valuable, but because he wants to dispose of them as bad for the patient, as what he needs to forget.

  Here the timeless is not, as in Augustine, eternity, but the unconscious, and we struggle against its forces, using substitute memories, writing about what ought to be disposed of precisely because of its inauthentic link to the unconscious. There are deposited anterior memories, and Augustine had those, but his were related to felicity and to God, not to incest and murder. Augustine needs access to the timeless, but our need is rather to forget it as totally as possible. We achieve access to its contents by the dual imaginative activity of the transference, but we do so with the object not of verifying them but of destroying them: to remember them, or even seem to do so, is a stratagem to relinquish or dispose of them. But Augustine needed them alive, because he sought the timeless for reasons having nothing to do with destruction; he wished to account for his life as a whole, given shape, made so by the action of memory and the timelessness into which it passes when it is finished.

  There seems little doubt that the dominant myth of autobiography is still Augustinian rather than Freudian. Of course it may be that all autobiography is in Freudian terms defensive or resistant, that to totalise, to close, to advertise a psychic structure that cannot on a strict view be authentic, is false and evasive. But it seems to be true that what excited many writers is to achieve some measure or simulacrum of closure, and thus a substitute timelessness. Tolstoy got over being impressed by Rousseau’s Confessions when he decided that, far from demonstrating the love of truth, Rousseau lied and believed his lies, which of course made him incapable of the truth to which he claimed to aspire. Rousseau himself admits that he left things out – from very pure motives – and occasionally made things up. Nabokov’s artful autobiography is full of elegantly rendered and various detail, but, as he once remarks, what gives such a work its formal value is thematic repetition. John Sturrock is especially interested in the phenomenon, so often repeated in autobiography as to be endoxically recognisable, of what he calls the ‘turn’ – the point of epiphany or conversion, seen as the moment when the person under description individuates or selves himself, as it were, finds the point from which all can be seen to cohere, and so achieves a kind of closure. This moment is present in some form virtually everywhere. It draws on or constitutes the memory of a deviance, often apparently quite slight, from some norm of experience or behaviour, a deviance that makes the writer, in his own eyes at any rate, worth writing about as a single person. In the process he cannot avoid providing relevant material on what he takes himself to be deviating from, so that autobiography appeals to our notions of normality as well as to our interest in the myriad possible deviancies; and to our interest also in wholeness, a quality we seek when recounting to ourselves our own lives. Everybody takes these things for granted, and if they want confirmations they will look for their best expression not in the narratives of analysands, which require a different and specialised form of attention, but in the works of people who understand the conditions of art: say, in poets such as Wordsworth. For to communicate persuasively the experience of the turn it is necessary to practise an art.

  Kinds of memory are subject to various sorts of classification, but we are familiar, largely on the evidence of works of art, with the idea that there is a rough, recognisable distinction between two kinds of memory, roughly voluntary and involuntary. Those ‘turns’, those hinges or fulcra on which a whole narrative depends and which justify the very existence of the narrative, are a very conspicuous, very ‘placed’, treatment of involuntary movements of consciousness momentarily present in some more accessible area of the memory, brought, as Augustine might have said, from special collections to open shelves, and then displayed against a background of simpler recollection. Now, their subtly fine bindings, gleaming against the drab covers of commonplace recollections, they stand out, and seem worthwhile recounting. Though they are the sort of thing that can, perhaps does, occur to everybody, these privileged moments are not easy to put into words; they are not only what the author is really about but also a test of whether he ought to be an author.

  I will borrow from Barrett J. Mandel a neat little illustration from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. The author describes it as one of the many ‘trifling things’ that make up a life, but still ‘a landmark’. The boy’s fundamentalist father wanted him to decline an invitation to a party, and suggested that he pray for guidance from the Lord as to whether he should go. Asked what the Lord’s answer was, the boy, well knowing his father’s confidence that God’s response would favour his own view, nevertheless replied, ‘The Lord says I may go to the Browns.’ The father ‘gazed at me in speechless horror’ and left the room, ‘slamming the door’. Mandel admires this and calls it genuine autobiography, but adds that the writer Gosse knows more about the father and his thoughts than the boy Gosse can have done, and for that reason is able to pinpoint this moment as one of significant rebellion, a type of such resistance, and set it in a larger context that explains why it was significant, a landmark and not a trifle – or, perhaps better, despite its seeming a trifle, and getting called that by an author who wished us to understand that he can now see how things hang together in a larger view of his remembered life. It is the mature, hindsighted record of an important stage in the widening gulf between father and son, part of a narrative designed to chart that process. We allow without demur that Gosse could not possibly be remembering his father’s precise words; we already know, from our own memories, the nature of the relation of such a moment to truth and memory. As Mandel expresses it, the author is saying to the reader: ‘My life was as this tale I am telling.’ This is a satisfying formula, and it implies a claim that in this form (as this tale) it will have power to indicate landmarks and confer meaning on what would otherwise be mnemonic trifles.

  We can add that an episode of this sort could have been worked over, told and retold to the author himself and perhaps to others; as the memory of a memory, of many memories perhaps, it acquires those associations of which Augustine speaks. To give this degree of centrality, of totality, to a memory, or to ‘thematise’ in the way recommended by Nabokov, is to seek to confer on the narrative a power to eliminate the restrictions of time; to institute its own laws of causality, to endow it with totality by invoking what W. B. Yeats called ‘the artifice of eternity’. Much autobiography presumes to imitate that power.

  Wordsworth offers an account of his life as ‘this tale I am telling’, though he might have accepted both the ultimate relation of time-dispersed elements to eternity, as adumbrated by Augustine, and the apparent triviality of some of the scattered episodes in themselves. Certain elements in this exercise in self-distinguishing are worth mention. Like Rousseau, Wordsworth is aware of the double consciousness all autobiographers must contend with. Childhood days have ‘self-presence’ in his mind (The Prelude, ii. 30–32); but more generally it is the present consciousness that speaks of a remote past recreated, remembered sometimes without his being able to give simple reasons for the memory. The most memorable of these memories, I suppose, are those spots of time: the gibbet, the girl with the pitcher, the bleak music of an old stone wall. These are the memories that count, and they count because the language that expresses their freight of emotion is, so to speak, adequately inadequate: it cannot verbalise what was not verbal, and so devoted itself to mystery and even discomfort.

  There are other escapes; one of the great things about Wordsworth, as with Augustine, is that one sees them as constituents of that calm society he could, at the end of this story, with pained rejoicing, detect in himself. For loss, and these insistent premonitions of further loss, he needs consolation, a word that occurs, in company with a ‘strength’ that endures, as early as The Prelude, iii. 108 (1805). Yet the fulcrum, the moment of illumination, comes a little later, when, after a night of dancing, he moves through ‘a common dawn’ and recognises, although making no vows, that nevertheless ‘vows were then made for me’; that henceforth he would be, ‘else sinning greatly, / A dedicated spirit. On I walked / In blessedness, which even yet remains’ (The Prelude, iv. 337–45).

  The kind of experience, here so delicately rendered, recurs in most autobiographies, always as a claim to distinction, to the stigma of individuality, of election, though as a rule far less distinguished. For in the end what distinguishes is not the experience itself but the force and authority of the language claiming it. The religious tone is unmistakable, the sense of involuntary vocation calmly accepted; the boldness and pathos of that ‘even yet remains’. It is, we say, pure Wordsworth.

  The Prelude is the greatest and most original of English autobiographies, but it is so not because Wordsworth’s intention is so different from most others. What we see particularly clearly in his prose is his desire to break through the assumptions and habits controlling or limiting normal introspection, as they limit poetry. The forces that break through, and enable deeper self-examination, are all anterior in origin to the formation of customary and habitual behaviour, shades of the prison-house; they are deep in the memory and hard to reach because of the distracting mist and clamour of ordinary life. But the memory, for a time at any rate, is accessible, its records can be reached, brought up from the deep store. It is not surprising that Wordsworth used the Platonic trope of anamnesis [the idea that the soul had existed before, in a purer state, where it gained its ideas], for, as Augustine also knew, the memory contains what seems not to have been put into it by the senses. Probably many vocations are discovered by some such process. These deep, vertiginous mnemonic plunges most of us know about from literature rather than from ourselves – not because we are denied them, but because they have to be given appropriate expression or enactment. The question as to what sorts of people are capable of doing this – what sorts of people should be writing autobiography anyway – I must, for the moment, leave unanswered.

  Index on Censorship 30 (2001)

  Malcolm Bowie, ‘Remembering the Future’

  ‘Interessantere Lebenserscheinugen’, erwiderte er, ‘haben wohl immer dies Doppelgesicht von Vergangenheit und Zukunft, wohl immer sind sie progressiv und regressiv in einem. Sie Zeigen die Zweideutigkeit des Lebens selbst.’

  ‘Life’s more interesting phenomena,’ he replied, ‘probably always have this Janus face towards the past and the future, are probably always progressive and regressive in one. They reveal the ambiguity of life itself.’

  Thomas Mann: Doktor Faustus (1947)